Besides working (successfully) on two long-term photography / writing projects, I’ve been busy this past year with a return to teaching full time, hence the absence from posting much. Long story short, but my undergraduate and graduate studies were a mixture of English, journalism, media studies, philosophy, and theology. This year I’m teaching a combination of English and photography classes in a secondary school. I was demonstrating to my photography students how to submit to competitions of the Association of Texas Photography Instructors. To show them the process of choosing images entering (putting in all the proper metadata), I used one of my own photos taken during the academic year as an example, a photograph of the Big Boy Locomotive 4014, on a promotional tour for Union Pacific.
The day the Big Boy had come through town, I took with me a square format film camera. Large crowds pushed down to the tracks to get a look at the giant steam locomotive, understandable, and I was glad that parents had an opportunity to show their children this part of our past, but blocking me from a good photo. I waited until the engineer began blowing out steam as the locomotive prepared to head out to its next stop. As people retreated back from the steam and soot, I moved forward into the hot cloud. With one eye on the viewfinder, I kept the other eye open to look about for the moment when the smoke would build up (for a kind of informal balance or “negative space” to the cab, the main area interest) and when there were lines of direction for the two men in the cab. I explained all this for my students, to help them in previsualizing their own photos.
To my surprise, the image I had prepared as an example for students took Best of Show in the Faculty Division of the ATPI competition. As well, some of my students, in what is the first year for this photography program, took home recognition in different student categories. A good example in another way for students, to put oneself out there, something not necessarily instinctive to us.